The garden was muddy making it difficult to plant… so I waited.
For exercise I took a walk on the state park trail, 20 minutes out and 20 minutes back… with stops for photos.
Wildflower
Although the pace was slow, I could feel the benefit of the walk. It energized me to install the deer fence around the tomatoes and perform a few garden chores before an afternoon thunder storm.
I picked turnips and sugar snap peas from the garden. The first Japanese beetles have arrived. The six-foot stakes worked well to protect the tomato plot from deer who eat the top shoots if they can get to them. It makes a significant difference in yield. Almost everything looks good.
With season’s end of soil blocking tomorrow comes blank space to fill… or not. I’ll do something but let go of filling every moment with intentional action a while back.
One of the most profound things I studied in art history was horror vacui, or fear of the empty. We looked at photos of Greek vases where every space of the surface had images on it. The human tendency is to fill everything the way a person gets a tattoo or two and ends up with a full sleeve. Fear of the empty. It is more creative and more difficult to leave spaces blank. Letting go the obsession to engage every chance to express ourselves frees us to produce better work.
A gardener gets time to think about things like this… and watch the arrival of Japanese beetles, and vegetables planted with one’s own hands grow in sunlight, and devise unique solutions like my deer fence.
Some days we have to stand back and look at what we’ve built:
Taco filling made with kale, black beans and Guajillo chili sauce.
I caught a break between thunder storms.
Friday I donned my wax jacket and rubber boots and went to the garden to harvest kale in a light drizzle.
The leaves were ready to pick and I wanted to get a regular shipment to someone.
It was a big harvest and what I didn’t give away was washed and went into the ice box and freezer.
I made a batch of taco filling with fresh kale, black beans and Guajillo chili sauce. It is Mexican street food and one of my favorite dishes. This year I planted Guajillo chili peppers in the garden to see if I can replicate what I’ve been buying from Mexico. Here’s the recipe for the sauce.
With today’s planting I consider the garden in. There are a couple of empty spots to fill and plenty of weeding and mulching, but the seedlings that need to be planted have been and it’s time to clean out a space to put my car into the garage again. Actually I just took a break from the computer to do it. The car is inside again marking the end of Spring garden planting.
From here gardening gets easier. I started Imperial broccoli seedlings to replace Blue Wind when the time comes. I also have basil and cilantro seedlings that will go in when there’s space. There are extra seedlings of tomatoes, eggplant and hot peppers ready if one already planted fails. I’m about ready to compost those as most everything took the first time this year.
As I mentioned here I moved the composter and spread out what remained. Some type of burrowing animal has been living there and I disrupted its home. It looks like it has been burrowing under the locust tree, which may be causing the problem with leafing out this year. It/they also got into the kitchen waste composter, which is comparatively tightly sealed. They drug a lot of stuff out, including most of the egg shells, to build a mound under the outdoors sink that was turned upside down sitting next to it. It was a surprise and I moved the sink up on a pallet.
The good news about compost was for the birds. Multiple species spent most of the afternoon prowling the newly spread compost looking for worms and insects, of which there were plenty. They don’t seem bothered by my presence.
The wax jacket is for garden and yard work. I bought it while vacationing in Stratford, Ontario where we went for three consecutive years when our daughter was in high school. It’s never been re-treated but repels water quite well and still fits. It’s the gardener’s equivalent of a barn coat.
My time at the farms finishes this week, tomorrow at Sundog Farm and Tuesday at Wild Woods Farm. I met with Trish Nelson at Blog for Iowa yesterday and I’ll be covering for her beginning July 1 so she can take a five-week hiatus. The first weekend in August I plan to return to Wilson’s Orchard for my seventh year as seasonal help and after that, it’s a rush to finish the year.
I plan to take a deep breath and reflect on my life as a gardener and citizen for a few minutes tonight after dinner.
An innovation I discovered at a political event was an open air composter made from shipping pallets.
At Jean and Jix Lloyd-Jones home they had a composter similar to what’s in the image outside their kitchen door leading to the yard.
During the last few years I secured some pallets and made one. It works great for all the greenery I harvest and weed from the yard and garden. It was time to use the compost in the bin so I re-built the device on a different spot, replacing the pallets that were being composted from exposure to the ground. While portable, it’s a permanent fixture in the garden.
This year some garden experiments are worth noting.
For the first time my arugula is producing well. What got me going is starting the tiny seeds in soil blocks then transplanting the seedlings to a garden row. In the past I broadcast them and picked the leaves from a mess of weeds that joined them. The taste of fresh arugula is something distinct and I’m thankful to have figured out how to grow it.
As readers may recall we missed the March 2 planting date for Belgian lettuce and punted. The idea is to make an early patch of lettuce from which leaves could be harvested. I got the seeds as remainders of last season at the home, farm and auto supply store. Because of delayed planting the starts from the greenhouse produced better results while the sown seeds got lumped together rendering the patch difficult to manage. The lettuce process requires further refinement and will begin with more careful selection of varieties from a seed catalogue. I will likely plant Belgian lettuce again since that’s a tradition passed down from Grandmother, but with more reliance on conventional process using the greenhouse.
I added Hakurei turnips to my standard purple top white globes. They produced early, in abundance. They make a great snack or sliced thin and mixed with arugula, a delicious salad. Multiple varieties of turnip proved to be a good thing.
I changed how I used buried containers this year. I planted successions of radishes and used one for daikon radishes which continue to mature. When the radishes were done in one container, I planted basil seedlings. I also planted onions starts in succession for green onions. The production has been better than the potatoes of past years (which were the reason for getting the containers). If I want potatoes I will acquire them from a farmer friend through one of my barter arrangements.
I broadcast okra seeds in a two by three-foot section and they successfully germinated. The first thinning is done and another will be needed once the best plants self-identify. I put them along a fence, but am a little concerned with that decision because deer love okra. We’ll see how it goes. The germination was remarkable.
A main learning is to allow more space between garden rows, but gardeners likely know that. There will be more lessons as the season progresses.
I walked due east from the garden along the utility easement to access a 25-acre stand of woods at the point where deer enter.
Deer are a constant presence in the neighborhood, especially during apple season, and I try to live in harmony with them by understanding what they will and won’t eat, and by using fences on the garden.
After dining, deer run across the same open space I walked to the wood line.
Based on the condition of the undergrowth, few humans visit the woods except around the edges. The main pathways are those made by deer and the brush is so thick I’m not sure how they get through. In 25 years of living here, there has been little interest in using the woods and I’ve hiked them less than half a dozen times.
Unnamed Creek, June 18, 2019.
I walked a deer path on the west bank of an unnamed creek up hill to the pond created by a now forgotten farmer. It was sweaty work and good exercise. I’ve studied the woods on maps for years and there was never a sense of being lost despite the claustrophobic feeling the thick undergrowth created.
The county planning and zoning commission requires our development to maintain a certain amount of open space so the woods can’t be developed with housing. If our association members had an interest in using the woods more, the deer paths could be upgraded to walking paths and mapped out. There has been little interest so it has become a habitat for wildlife.
If we were to develop the woods as a recreational area, there would be little money for it, so the work would be by volunteers. There would be a lot of work to do. Numerous native species of plants exist there, and identification and preservation seems important. The canopy is relatively thick and consideration should be given to long-term forest health. That might mean thinning some mature trees so younger saplings can grow. There are a lot of fallen branches which could be chipped into mulch to pave pathways. It could turn into a really big project. As busy as everyone is, I’m not sure who would volunteer and I know almost everyone in the association.
Native Fern, June 18, 2019.
Suffice it to spend an hour or so hiking the woods once in a while. It takes effort to forget the manicured lawns and gardens to focus on what is in front of us in the woods. By the time I reached the top of the hill, I had forgotten whatever seemed important when I left the garden to focus on finding my way, and then my way home.
It occurred to me that even though the association owns the woods, that ownership is only loosely so. I mean the woods will continue to develop as it has, enabling brief and specific glimpses into what used to be when Iowa was mostly tallgrass prairie. We are visitors on Earth, and that for a short while. Ownership is a cultural concept unknown to the plants and animals that live in the woods. No one truly owns the woods despite legal documents so indicating.
If I want to understand my relationship with wildlife better, I need to spend more time in those woods. Maybe during another hike in the near future.
It’s time for a brief hiatus to focus on 5:30 a.m. sunrises and clear days in the garden.
I’ve been listening to tracks from the Grateful Dead’s 1989 concert at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisc. Uncle John’s Band is a favorite performance.
My main experience with the Dead was during my undergraduate years when I ran a carbon arc spotlight at a 1971 Grateful Dead concert at the University of Iowa Field House, and attended another in 1973. I have many of their albums on vinyl, bought in real time as they were released, although sharing bootleg tapes of concerts became a thing before the internet enabled sharing. Hope you enjoy this video.
During the last couple of years I periodically went under a spell.
I don’t mean something another human (or animal) cast on me, but a time of uneasy dizziness and disorientation when I wake.
After a discussion with my physician, he said not to worry. Okay…
It happened again this morning and I did this: Remedy 1: go back to bed. Remedy 2: eat breakfast. Remedy 3: go outside and harvest garlic scapes, radishes and sugar snap peas for dinner. Remedy 4: take a nap. Remedy 5: Read about the impact of infectious disease on pre-Columbian societies. Remedy 6: eat a bowl of soup. Remedy 7: find a recipe for garlic scape pesto.
By 2:30 p.m. I was feeling more normal. Normal enough to turn on my desktop and maintain some files, deposit a check from a writing gig, and open up WordPress. Normal for a sixty-something is different from when I was a thirty-something. Once I’m done I may go outside to breathe fresh air again and feel a breeze. That seems the most impactful and I could use the exercise. The garden was too wet from last night’s rain to accomplish much there, even if I felt up to it.
I’m trying to keep my blood sugar level within a reasonable range to prevent type two diabetes and that may have prompted today’s episode. According to the Mayo Clinic, a healthy range of daily carbohydrate intake should be between 225 and 325 grams. My estimated average has been 202 since I began the project May 25, ten percent lower than the bottom of the range. In addition I’ve lost 17 pounds since then. I feel better, at least when I’m not under a spell.
The biggest change has been my stomach growls when it is ready for a meal. That hasn’t happened for a very long time. When I hear the sound now, I get a snack if it’s not meal time, or fix a meal if it is. Being mostly retired is the only way this kind of tracking and growl response can work as there are too many distractions in a regular life.
There are always free snacks in the break room of the home, farm and auto supply store to tempt one to give up tracking carbs to enjoy some sweet or salty snacks or baked goods. A recent study of 5,222 employees across the U.S. found we consume an average of 1,300 additional calories per week made up of food at the office, according to Shape.com. Working only two days a week makes a difference for me as the will power struggle is absent when I’m not working at the retail outlet.
This carb counting process continues until August when I get a new blood test and see my practitioner again. We’ll see what we see. According to my ophthalmologist the blood vessels in my eyes look fine and diabetes is absent. I suspect the spell was due to not eating enough before bedtime. I experienced glycogen burnout only once in my life, during a century bicycle ride, and this isn’t it.
I don’t like losing the whole morning and part of the afternoon. But as I finish this post, I’m feeling back to normal: sustaining a life in a turbulent world.
In Iowa presidential candidates attempt to generate hope. Not just hope of winning in 2020, but to make our country a better place beyond the next election.
So much has changed in our lives and not for the better.
Progress will be difficult for Democrats when the hegemony of wealth and business touches most of us. The hold libertarians and conservatives have on us is based on influence in our jobs, health care, energy companies, transportation, retail stores, and social institutions. Whether we know it or not, we mostly work for them. Something’s got to give in our politics because as the richest get richer, society is not working for the rest of us.
“Establishment politics is just not good enough,” presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said at a CNN Town Hall in 2016. “We need bold changes, we need a political revolution.”
If the shine came off this trademark Sanders claim and the revolution has stalled according to the Washington Post, it may be because a number of candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and even long shot Marianne Williamson, are all calling for profound change in American life.
Warren calls for “big, structural change to rebuild the middle class.”
Buttigieg wants a “fresh start for America… It’s about more than winning an election. It’s about winning an era.” He’s thinking of the millennial era.
Williamson wants evolution to a politics of love, saying on her website, “Our task is to generate a massive wave of energy, fueled and navigated by we the people, so powerful as to override all threats to our democracy. Where fear has been harnessed for political purposes, our task is to harness love.”
Presidential candidates need something to elevate their campaigns, which is well and good. I recall a time when I looked for that in a presidential candidate. The nomination of Hubert Humphrey in 1968 cured me. I’m looking for something else and question the idea of remaking everything. We are in pretty deep for that.
A main issue is libertarians and conservatives, the Radical Right as Jane Mayer calls them, would undo everything progressives have accomplished since the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. Under President Trump they have a shot at that, maybe the best shot ever. What do they believe? As Mayer pointed out in her 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, “taxes are a form of tyranny; that government oversight of business is an assault on freedom.” Things we take for granted — Social Security, Medicare, the Environmental Protection Agency, OSHA, the National Labor Relations Board — would all be dissolved if the radical right had their way. To the extent a revolution is called because of changes in this status quo, it is too little, too late.
The radical right already owns us. Whether we consume their media, buy their fuel, use their electricity and natural gas, invest in their financial services companies, or shop in their stores, a percentage of each transaction finds it’s way to the wealthiest people in the country. We don’t care if using Wells Fargo, shopping at Amazon or Walmart, using fossil fuels, or working at their jobs is bad for us. We have chosen a way of life and if the radical right is behind it, they have been out of sight, out of mind for a very long time. Not only are we owned, we have been hoodwinked into believing the status quo has been good to us.
During Summer 2019 the Democratic candidates for president will be putting their best foot forward to persuade Iowans to caucus for them. A bright light should shine on the idea of remaking everything in a candidate’s framework. The last time Democrats had a mandate for change was after the re-election of Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Given the structural problems with our government — the electoral college, gerrymandered congressional districts, voter suppression, to name a few — it is unrealistic to expect any political revolution, evolution, big structural change, or winning of an era.
When in 2016 Hillary Clinton said we are stronger together, the phrase was not new. Among the challenges of the 2020 election are for Democrats to maintain control of the House of Representatives and elect a Democratic president. The extended presidential primary season works against us on both of those goals pitting good Democrats against other good Democrats as we promote “my” candidate. Our goal should be to stop the radical right from further bleeding a Democracy on life support by winning the election. It will take all Democrats to get this done. Once we do that we can talk about what’s next.
It is hard to keep hope alive. The problem with our democracy is logic no longer applies when it comes to voting or to almost anything else outside the purview of the richest Americans.
You say you want a revolution. Well, you know, we all want to change the world. Unlike the Fab Four, I’m not sure it’s gonna be alright.
I don’t receive a lot of phone calls and am wary when one rings in. The breakout of inbound is something like 60 percent spam and unsolicited telemarketing, 20 percent political calls, and 20 percent humans with whom I need to have a conversation.
The political calls are getting more frequent and I’m picking them up from familiar area codes… for now. I don’t know how they get my number.
The telephone app is one of the least used on my mobile device.
While I lived in Germany, a fellow officer brought his family with him. He couldn’t stand to be away from his spouse who had to stay in touch with close family back in Alabama. The phone bills almost ruined them. I don’t recall how they resolved it, other than she returned to Alabama early, he moved into the BOQ (bachelor officers quarters) and they had to stretch the $11,000 annual officer’s pay a lot further than it was designed to go. I had a telephone from the local German company but rarely used it. It was too expensive to phone home even though there was a clicker on it that informed me in real time how much I used. The clicker went really fast when I was on line with Mother.
I had two phone calls this week from the Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg campaigns inviting me to events in the county seat. With the remaining garden and yard work I don’t see that I can afford time to attend either. I do have the Warren office opening on my calendar for Thursday after work at the home, farm and auto supply store. For the summer, I’m sticking to political events closer to home because when I make the half-hour trip to the county seat or to Iowa’s second largest city it takes prime time out of a day I should be spending working at home. I’m usually spent afterward, even if the event itself is short.
Not only do I not like using a telephone, I like driving even less.
I plan to leave my mobile device in the kitchen and work outside until it begins to rain. I have voicemail, which I may access when I come indoors, or may not.
The rush to use ingredients is upon us and the garden isn’t even fully planted.
After watering I made the rounds of six garden plots and harvested radishes, turnips, spring onions, lettuce, broccoli and kale… lots of kale.
I had planned to take a big box of kale to a political event in Cedar Rapids yet forgot it on the folding table in the garage. Upon my return home I bagged it for delivery to library shift workers later today. For now, there is always a home for kale. It looks really good before the bugs and worms start to eat it.
Blue Wind broccoli is an early variety that requires close monitoring to pick it at its peak. Reserving some florets to be added to salads, I steamed it as a side dish for dinner. In fact a lot of kitchen work happened yesterday.
The first thing I did after waking was make pesto with fresh basil. It was the beginning of a day of cookery.
For breakfast I made a casserole using leftover brown rice and fresh spinach. While the casserole was baking I filled the Dutch oven with carrots, celery leaves, onions and turnip greens to make what has become a traditional spring vegetable broth. For dinner I heated a veggie burger and served it with the broccoli and kale.
My go-to kale recipe is simple. I de-stemmed and tore seven or eight kale leaves into 2 x 2 inch pieces in a stainless steel bowl. I heated a wok and added a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. I diced half a large onion and sauteed until translucent. I added five cloves of roughly chopped garlic and a quarter cup of pine nuts, cooking until the vegetables were tender and the aroma of garlic rose from the wok. Handful by handful I added the kale while stirring constantly. Once it was all in the wok I added vegetable broth to help cook the kale down. Once the liquid evaporated, I seasoned with salt and pepper to make two servings.
Perhaps the best meal of the day was lunch for which I toasted a slice of bread and spread pesto on it, serving with a cup of cottage cheese — simple pleasures in a time of abundance. We have to pace ourselves to see that as little as possible goes to waste.
Marianne Williamson addressing a gathering at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on June 10, 2019.
About 11:15 a.m. I left the garden and drove Ely Blacktop to 76th Street and headed West to Cedar Hall on the main campus of Kirkwood Community College where presidential candidate Marianne Williamson joined State Senator Rob Hogg in a “climate conversation.”
Since I would be returning to the garden after the event, I wore my overalls and mud-caked gardening shoes.
I joined a number of students and staff, along with local members of environmental groups in a large operating theater-style classroom. By the time we got started more than 40 people had joined us.
I attended partly because the venue was close to home, partly to support Senator Hogg’s efforts to engage presidential candidates about climate change, and partly to see if Williamson’s campaign is, as some have called it, a “joke.”
Marianne Williamson taking questions at Kirkwood Community College, June 10, 2019.
Williamson’s campaign is not a joke. Why anyone would criticize a woman who is successful in her own right, by objective standards such as having written four number one New York Times best selling books, had me curious. She made it to the first two Democratic National Committee presidential debates, although just barely achieving one percent support in three separate national polls to qualify. She’s dead serious about her platform and as confident as any of the other 23 presidential candidates. With great optimism she said, “If you’re going to run for president, you might just win.”
The main news out of the event was Williamson did not support a separate DNC debate on the topic of climate change. The reason, she said, was “because there is no competing with Jay Inslee.” Williamson also said the topic cannot be separated from the broader problems in the United States. She made a point. Advocates for addressing the deleterious effects of the climate crisis cannot separate this one issue into a silo separate from other important matters like health care, education and national defense and expect to resolve them.
State Senator Rob Hogg explaining why the Iowa caucuses are first in the nation. “We do it right,” he said.
Williamson made a strong case for slowing our relationship with Saudi Arabia. She said as president she would immediately stop arms sales to the kingdom and end United States support for the war in Yemen, a conflict she said was immoral.
She also weighed in on nuclear disarmament, asking why we need 100 aircraft capable of delivering nuclear bombs when dropping ten of them could end life as we know it? It was refreshing to hear a candidate raise the issue without prompting.
Dave Bradley at Blog for Iowa wrote Williamson was positioned in the third tier of candidates, among those “who truly have little chance and are often running to push some ideas or philosophy.”
Marianne Williamson has been finding her way all her adult life. Win or lose, the time spent with her this afternoon was memorable for her determination to assert her solutions her way. As Hogg referred to her speech in Cedar Rapids yesterday, it is the “politics of love” and quite different from the offerings of other candidates.
Neighborhood Network News recorded this event. The YouTube video can be viewed here.
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